Taste and openness are at work here in ways not often seen in larger ballet companies. Too bad the actual dancing wasn't better.

Dancing to canned music, with fewer dancers than it had in New York this spring, and in works that managed to be unflattering to dance and dancers alike, DanceGalaxy did not exactly make a good first impression to San Franciscans.

It was so obvious that the ballets by Balanchine, Smuin and Forsythe were meant to be more exciting than what was on the Cowell stage Saturday night that there is also reason to suppose that what came off as a minor Wayne ballet called "Andante" may well have been shortchanged too.

Smuin's "Quattro a Verdi," which Smuin Ballets/SF will revive here in the fall, opened the program in a version set by Evelyn Cisneros that was danced by Christina Fagundes, Cheryl Sladkin, Steven Hyde and Nils Bertin Wallin. This is Smuin in a classical mode, out neither to jazz up ballet nor to extend its vocabulary. It is an elegant entertainment with echoes of Petipa, with clever combinations of beautiful bodies.

Fagundes got it right, not only with fine presence and epaulement but also with the sort of old-fashioned oomph all ballet needs. Sladkin was lovely but her piques were downright scary, and the two men were at best tentative.

An unintended question arose at the start: Why do this ballet this way at all? Smuin's piece, much like the Balanchine and Forsythe works that followed, needs the vast space of an opera house as well as live music; it also needs a sense of occasion to create the intended effect. This "Quattro a Verdi" was simply not big enough or good enough.

Forsythe's "Artifact II," set to Bach's Chaconne in D minor, provided a stark contrast with the Smuin in terms of style but also suffered in execution. It takes sleek, streamlined figures to pull off Forsythe's electrifying kinetic violence, his sudden shifts in weight and his enigmatic pantomime. DanceGalaxy co-founder Mehdi Bahiri's figure these days is too chunky to look convincing in this dance. Perhaps he was auditioning for Smuin's "My First Time"?

At least the suite from Balanchine's "Who Cares?" that closed the program had enough life in the dancing to justify the whole affair. Bahiri, Fagundes and ravishing DanceGalaxy co-founder Judith Fugate, as well as Bonnie Pickard, Steven Hyde and Francois Perron, provided a lesson in enjoying Gershwin's music as they moved. The steps could have been smoother, but the smiles were real.